How Long Does It Take To Make Real Profits Or Good Money With An Online Business?

I receive many questions via email every single day but my #1 most asked question is…

How long do you think it will take for me to make money with my business?

Here’s another common permutation of this same question…

I need to be able to make money in 6 months, can it be done?

And finally my favorite…

Can I expect to make 100K in the first year with my online store like you did? One year ought to be enough runway right?

So here’s the truth.

Brand new entrepreneurs are horrible at predicting how far they can get with their businesses in the short term.

In fact, they often grossly overestimate how much money they can make in their first year. But on the flip side, they also grossly underestimate how much they can make in 3+ years with their businesses as well.

So anytime a reader or a student asks me any of the above questions, I immediately start to question their commitment and how serious they are about starting a real business.

Why?

It’s because when someone asks me how much they can make in 6 months, it usually means that they are only willing to stick it out for 6 months to see if their business idea has a chance. This is not enough time!

Starting A Business Requires Long Term Thinking

Starting a business takes commitment. And I don’t mean a year or a few years. When I say commitment, I’m talking about giving it a go for at least 3-5 years.

When my wife and I started our online store, we were in it for the long haul. Although we set a goal to make 100K before the baby arrived, we were ready to work at it and keep the store afloat indefinitely until we got the formula correct.

If we didn’t have this mentality, we might have quit at 6 months because sales were not where we wanted them to be.

We weren’t convinced that the store could ever make enough money to supplant my wife’s income.

We didn’t believe that our market was large enough. We didn’t think that we could crack the first page of search to get the necessary traffic.

What’s funny is that we started our online store with this delusion of grandeur that our business would start making decent money within the first 3 months. After all, we had what we thought was a fool proof strategy.

Our initial plan was to siphon away EBay customers by posting auctions online and steering them over to our online store through links in the auction description.

Then, we would roam the wedding forums and guide customers over to our shop by making recommendations to would-be brides.

But what ended up happening is that we violated EBay’s terms of service and got our account temporarily suspended for posting external links on auctions. Furthermore, we repeatedly got banned on the wedding forums for being overly promotional.

There are no shortcuts. You have to be in it for the long haul.

If you are wondering whether you can start making money right away because you are in a desperate situation, then chances are you lack the resolve to see your business idea through.

Estimating Time, Money And Human Nature

But here’s what is interesting about human nature. When my wife and I reached our goal of making 100K during the end of our first year of business, we were overjoyed.

But at that point we didn’t think we could do it again.

We didn’t think that our business could possibly grow any more. From our perspective, the business had peaked!

After all, it was a major struggle for us to reach that number in the first place because it involved so much legwork and a little bit of luck. In fact, we didn’t think that we could achieve the same sales pace ever again.

What we didn’t realize was that the first year was just the tip of the iceberg. Every year since then, our business has increased in the double and triple digits! Never in a million years did we think that this could happen.

Which brings me to reiterate my second point.

As humans, we often overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term, but we vastly underestimate what can be done in the long run.

When I first started MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, I was hoping to start making significant money within a year of launch.

Even though I started my blog with a 5 year plan towards profitability, I full on expected to be making at least 5 figures by the end of year 1.

But in reality, it wasn’t until well into year 3 when I started to see hockey stick growth. Today, the blog is practically growing on autopilot.

When I first launched my Create A Profitable Online Store course, I was only hoping to sign on about 30 students. But today, I have over 70X that amount and the course’s growth continues to surprise me!

Setting The Right Expectations

The key to running any successful business is to set the right expectations and the right level of commitment.

When my wife and I began our online store in 2007, we full on planned to still be in business in 2012. When I started my blog in the end of 2008, I full on planned to still be blogging 5 years later.

When I launched my “Create A Profitable Online Store” course in 2011, I made a long term commitment to continuously add content to the course for many years to come.

Even though the course started out with practically no content, today I have well over 100 hours of video in the course and a 400 page PDF ebook to show for it. And the best part is that the course continues to grow and evolve!

Most people quit their businesses within their first year. If you aren’t willing to devote at least 3-5 years to your business, don’t even bother. Why? Because most of the wealth and the profits are to be had well after your first year.

Expecting your business to be vastly profitable within a short time frame is a half assed way to think about your business.

Let’s be realistic.

During the first year of any online business, your website is probably not going to have superior search engine placement. Your business probably won’t have a large customer base. Your business probably won’t have much name recognition.

It takes time for word of mouth to spread. It takes time for things to snowball. Looking back at my blog, I didn’t think that I was getting anywhere at all after year 1. But after doing this for 7 years now, I look back and am completely amazed at how far I’ve come.

Change Your Mindset

Here’s the biggest problem that I see with most people.

They expect to make a significant amount of money in under a year and then they give up when they don’t reach their goal. I’ve had several students in my course give up early and even had an extremely talented student give up on his online store after just 6 months!

The first year is going to be tough and the most awkward. After all, you know nothing during your first year. Even if you have a great mentor or teacher, you still may not be able to absorb everything right away. So you’ll make mistakes…but that’s fine!

That first year is also when you’ll be having the most fun because you’ll be learning a heck of a lot. Year 1 should not be your end game. Instead, you should treat year 1 as your learning year and expect to reap the rewards in the years ahead.

In a recent survey conducted among students in my Create A Profitable Online Store Course, 56% of students in my class who launched a product and stuck it out for a full year are now making AT LEAST 4 figures per month.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of human nature is that we all love shortcuts. We all love to believe that we can strike it rich in just 6 months.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s still possible to make a good chunk of change during your first year but you should go into it expecting to commit at least 3-5 years.

Avoid The Easy Short Term Money

Now if you’re going to commit to a business for 3-5 years, you also want to make sure your business model has long term potential.

Everywhere you look, there are a number of “make quick cash” types of schemes out there on the Internet. And yes, some of these might actually work but only in the short term.

For example, there’s a popular scheme right now where people buy up goods on Amazon and sell them on EBay at higher prices and lots of people are making money this way.

But do you think this “business model” can last?

Most people are attracted to businesses that are “as easy as possible to make money” but I’m the complete opposite.

The harder it is to start your business, the more lasting power it will have.

The more value you can add, the more money you will make.

So before you choose an online business model, ask yourself how you are adding value.

Is buying up surplus goods online and selling them on Amazon providing more value than coming up with your own branded products to sell?

Are you spending all of your time trying to make short term money that will never scale?

Striking A Balance

The key to finding the right business to pursue is to avoid randomly pulling yourself in all directions at once.

Don’t throw up a bunch of businesses, give them a go for 6 months as a trial and then take them all down because they aren’t working out.

You should go into every business venture with a full commitment to put your best foot forward. Are you still going to want to be running this business in 3-5 years? If you don’t think you’ll be able to maintain your interest for that long, then don’t even bother.

What you want to avoid is starting over every 6 months. If this is happening to you, then you aren’t committed and you are calling it quits without giving your business a chance to grow into something bigger.

Remember, most of the profits for your business are going to occur after 3-5+ years so make sure that you pick something that you are willing to maintain for at least that long.

Take Time Out Of The Equation

In fact once you’ve decided what you want to do, take “time” out of the equation altogether. Don’t give yourself ANY artificial constraints on how well you need to perform in a given time frame.

Instead, make your business a part of your daily or weekly routine.

That’s right.

Set aside some time, the same time, every day or week to work on your business.

Don’t even think about it.

Just work on it on a regular basis and tell yourself that you are going to maintain this routine FOREVER!

This way, your business will be a part of your life and time becomes irrelevant.

The only down side is that I’m not spending all my free time making music. But on the plus side it pushes me to do more research and improve my knowledge of music theory.

And of course the dream is to be able to support myself full time with this and other projects so that I can live a more flexible life style and spend more time on music.

Marianasays:

Wow couldn’t have come at a better time! I was just thinking man, there’s no way I’ll be making six figures anytime soon…and I was questioning my choices. However what you say makes total sense. And we need to be patient and work consistently, even when things seem less than ideal. I do believe in my niche, I just have to change my original strategy a bit to make it work well…that’s business, though!

I think the 3rd year is make or break too. Well, at least you should have a really good idea of how much your business can make in the 3rd year. I don’t think I’m going to make 6 figures anytime soon though. I’ll give it another year or two and see where it takes me.

Great post and although it’s so hard sometimes to keep going, having the knowledge that you know what you’re building, that it will come together, and that user growth will eventually be exponential takes faith!

Yep! First year in business [last year] by this time in December 1st thru 13th… 9 lousy orders. This year so far, for December 1st thru 13th, 124 orders.

Longevity. Almost all the same products selling as last year — just finally getting found because I’ve been around enough for Google to notice me and get a few of my product listings on the first page. I’m sure there are more things I could be doing to make that faster, but for the amount of effort I am putting in, I’m happy with the progress.

When I first started my blog, I was just excited whenever we got a new comment or a new subscriber. The first $100 didn’t come for 5 months, and I think we made $4,000 in the first year (most of it in months 11 and 12). The second year blew away my expectations and we made over $60k. We’re a few months into our third year now and on pace to bring in about $80k.

The first year is basically building the foundation for the growth that will come afterwards.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! We launched our site 8 days ago (it took us almost 6 months of work and product creation to get to that point). Now we’ve been trying to work on learning everything about Google Adwords, social media, SEO, etc. Last night we watched one of your videos and you said that it took you guys a few months to iron out your Adwords campaign. I think we assumed you just got online, sat down for 3 hours and magically the orders came pouring in. While our goal for year one is much, much more modest than 100k, it’s great to be continually reminded that this first year is all about learning… and that it takes more than a few hours to become an expert.

Hi Steve! I love that your initial plans to generate traffic ended up getting you banned as spammers, but instead of cursing your bad luck and giving up you adjusted your plans and found the path to success. I made many mistakes when I started blogging and some shortcuts I took ended getting me nowhere. Now I know it is better to spurn the shortcuts and stay the course.

And I truly believe most people who fail simply gave up too soon. Success was probably right around the next corner but they quit before they could see it.

Hi Mike,
Good to hear from you. I think the single best thing we both did was to join the Mafia:) Especially with blogging, it’s often a numbers game as well as a waiting game with the search engines assuming you put out great content.

It works the same offline as well. I have worked with many entrepreneurs that have 2-5 years in and they are just bumping along and getting by and then all of the sudden their work gets noticed and they start to take off. I think that a 3 year commitment (of three years of hard work) is really the minimum. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if my store became the exception to that!

Thanks for the reality check, Steve. I think the message of instant Internet riches that’s so pervasive right now, actually stops a lot of people from starting real businesses because they think if they haven’t made it in a few months, that they’re missing out on something else and switch. For the first three months with my online store, I had two orders, but now I get new orders every day. I can see how the things I’m learning about marketing the site, improving SEO and letting word spread are actually having an effect.

Online business is a very volatile business and anything could happen from seo black list to being banned from money making affiliate schemes. So its better to start a business with an open mind that perhaps nothing will come out of it.

This was a great article with many nuggets that most people will miss. Thanks for the great post. I have been in a Home Based Business opportunity for the past 4 1/2 years and I hate to see so many people make a brash judgment on a business that they have never even investigated fully. Do your due diligence and research any opportunity fully before you make the mistake of writing anything off.

Hi Steve.
Thank you for this article and the information you send me/all of us every week. It has helped me to start getting back on track and feeling good about myself again.
I’ve had a couple of small businesses already that did not work out the way I had planned. They were a great experience and I don’t regret having them but it has left me a little gun shy to start something new, particularly online. I had a misconception of what it meant to own and operate my own business, I didn’t realize what kind of strength and character and major planning it took to see it through. One thing I know is that it cannot solely be about the money or it won’t work. I speak from experience. You need to have a connection, a passion to your chosen business and a real desire to help, inspire and connect with others. That’s what it’s truly all about. Once you have those key foundations in place, the money will come.
I was almost going to give up on the online idea and unsubscribe from your newsletter and then I had a change of heart. I have been rebuilding myself from the ground up and regaining my self-confidence. I’d been working on it for a while but it just wasn’t coming together. But thank the Lord, all the work I had done (on myself) finally paid off and things have started to click again and the ideas are starting flow. What a great feeling. Thank you for being a part of that. 

Hi, thanks for the great article. I am going to show it to my wife, since i just started my online business and she keeps asking when we are going to be making money. I know it won’t happen overnight but everyday that i learn something new i know i am getting closer to my goals.

Hi Steve!
this topic is quite tricky I think. People should be counting the time when they launch the online store, not when they register the business. I think many people thinks that they will register the business on Monday, on Tuesday they find supplier, on Wednesday they setup the store, on Thursday they will launch it and from Friday the orders will start rolling in…

In my opinion it should be splitted into two phases – setting up the business and store, and launchig the store and marketing it. The first phase can take from days to months, but the second phase will be always the same – from 3-6 months to see first results ( not 6 figures 😉 ).

I started my business in January 2012, but launched my store in May 2013. The main reason why it took me so long is that I am not living in US… Also, I started the business based on the worst reasons – I was short of money each month and it seemed to me very easy to register business over internet and start selling on Amazon right away. But with time I changed my mind significantly.

I did rethink why I am having and want to run my own business – to create something valuable, to help people in lighting industry to get the right and high quality products for their needs. Also, I did rethink my goals – make $40k till the end of 2013 to be able to pay my personal debt I have and to have enough money for one year living without a day job and to be able to focus fully on my own business.
As a 3-5yrs goal I would like to grow the store in order to become number one in the lighting industry.

I think, most of the people are in similar situation as I was last year to make some quick money. I dont think they expect to make 6 figures within 6months. Same as I dont expect to make it. But 40k is not much for 6months, while one already know about SEO, marketing, etc… What could be a bit confusing is that in some other post you mentioned that when you launched your store, you started with Adwords and orders started to roll in almost immediatelly. Here you say something a bit different.

But this article is quite right, it is better to expect less short term and more long term. Maybe I will not reach my goal to be number one in five year, but even number two or three will be success! If I think to be in top ten in five years, I’ll probably reach only top 20 or even not make single dollar at all…

Anyway, thank you very much for your straight forward posts, easy to read!

I am so glad I stumbled upon your website. So informative and therapeutic as well…
I recently launched my online baby boutique in July 2013, roughly 4 months ago. I have had a total of 9 sales this is including a few friends. I know it takes time for an online business to grow but it has been a month now and i have had ZERO sales.
I am on facebook, twitter, pinterest, tumblr, and instagram. I feel a bit overwhelmed.
I do update on a weekly basis, if i could do more i would but i have a full time job and I am also a single mother. This reason alone, I must succeed!!! I do not have any interest in selling other products, this is sort of a passion project as well as a business. I love the childrens fashion industry. So I’m on the right track, right? I am not looking at this as a short term business but I have been feeling discouraged. I have to be honest, I do the minimal on my social media except for instagram, it’s so much fun!
any advice and tips would be helpful for a gal like myself. Again, I love your story and your journey to success.
Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for your reply! I do have a couple of questions. Can I depend on social media only? At this point, i don’t really have enough funds to pay for ads…I was hoping once business picks up i can then look into shelling out some money for my business. Is that a silly question??

I love this post!! It can take a while to get momentum but when you do your business generally grows with a lot more momentum. I think it has to be a reflection on our instant gratification society – if we don’t get any traction right away it must not be working. I always think be to the old are you interested or committed. You will only have the patient to keep working if you are actually committed!

Great article, it gives small businesses hope to keep trying and not give up.
I started my online business on the side of my full time job in the hopes of one day giving up my job and doing my online business full time.
I’ve been going now for around 3 years and it’s definately grown but not as much as I would have liked, I haven’t been able to give up my full time job yet.
I’d love if you could take a look at my website and see what changes I could make to improve sales.

Remember that the ‘key to success is to stay in the game’. Will there even be a slim chance of victory if we give up and quit too soon?

No, we are done at least for now. However, if we can just keep trying, even in the face of not seeing any tangible results over an extended period, there is still a chance things will start improving as we grow along.

This is exactly my experience.
I started with a Kickstarter three years ago to prove the market for the product and the price point.
For the first year it seemed like I was not pushing the boulder up the hill, not even holding it in place, rather simply trying to keep it from rolling back and crushing me. This year started with it staying put by itself, and just in the past few months it’s got energy of its own. Just like you said Steve about the timing. Wow!
Commitment is key. Mine was either succeed or have to get in my truck every day, leave my animals and farm, and go to a real job. I simply could not accept failing. It’ been a lonely, scary road, but failure was not an option.
To your point too about businesses that are harder to start having lasting power, and that the more value you add the more money you can make: I have reinvented the cuckoo clock, designing them for the American aesthetic. My first design has sold over 250 this year at $395 each, and my second design just came out, with a third hot on its heels. The factory manager came over from Germany to meet me because as he said, what I’m doing is where his growth is. Wow! I’ve created my own niche within a niche. In the next couple of weeks I’ll break $100K in revenue for the year. I still haven’t paid myself (and am living on fumes — yes, it takes longer than you’d ever imagine!) because I need more than one design to cover my overhead. So, I put everything back in the business and have even gone from zero debt to using credit cards (cheaper than a business loan) to fund more clocks. A business is a long term project. Which is why it’s so incredibly rewarding. I’ve put every fiber of my being into it and after nearly three years I’m seeing the results.
Business is the most thrilling theme park ride imaginable. If you buy a ticket, buckle in!
Such an excellent post Steve. Everyone starting a business should read it!
~Jodie

Your 56% statistic is simply awesome, albeit it’s revenue, so one could assume that net profits are anywhere between 30-60% of those monthly numbers. I suggest you test highlighting that chart on your sales page to increase conversions. Lots of “gurus” sell their courses and even publish student case studies but rarely do they mention how many students out of those who signed up actually see significant results! This leads me to believe that you successfully dismantle barriers for the majority of your students in your course. I’ve taken relatively expensive courses in the past only to feel burned once inside, but your honest advice, top notch materials, and 56% statistic makes your course go on my wishlist.

“The key to finding the right business to pursue is to avoid randomly pulling yourself in all directions at once.”

So true. I got distracted and tried to take shortcuts, which cost me dearly. In Oct 2014 I bought an expired domain because it was perfect for a brand I wanted to build. As I started building the site I noticed there was already traffic coming from a few huge sites (top 10k in Alexa). So, instead of doing what I originally wanted, I got distracted and thought “hey, I’ll set up an Amazon Affiliate account, rebuild some of the pages getting traffic, and make money that way!” I dropped my original idea, spent time building the pages, and started paying to get content built out. One of my shortcuts was using an Amazon shopping cart plugin. Turns out it was setting cookies when it wasn’t supposed to, so I got banned from Amazon. I got discouraged and let the site sit there instead of going back to my original idea. Big mistake!

Three months ago I came across a site doing exactly what I was originally planning to do and it was growing in leaps and bounds. Over 50,000 Pinterest followers, Alexa rating around 500k and gaining rapidly (now it’s around 160k). Turns out the domain wasn’t even registered until Jan 2016! Instead of being 15 months ahead of this site, I’m now 7 months behind.

After seeing this site, I dusted off my old domain and started adding one post, one Pinterest pin, and one Facebook post per day. First post was on July 15. On August 29 I got my first bump in traffic through Pinterest (110 visitors), then another bump, and another. September 1st had 127 unique visitors, September 30 had 3,739! My highest day so far has been over 4,500 uniques. Traffic jumps up and down quite a bit since it is mainly from Pinterest right now, but overall it is growing nicely. My email list has grown to over 800 subscribers so far. I kick myself for not doing this TWO YEARS AGO! (I just checked and a week from today will be two years from when I bought the domain.)

I guess that was a long story to show others what *not* to do and how easy it is to go down the wrong path! Don’t get distracted, don’t take shortcuts. Solid advice from Steve!

Hi Steve,
I love your blog and podcast! I think there’s no other website I tune in so regularly to catch up with the latest posts and podcasts! So thanks a million for all the hard work you’re putting into it! This article is one of the best I’ve read in a while and I agree with you 100%! Building a successful business is a long-term venture and after just one year it’s nearly impossible to tell if a business model is profitable or not.
All the best, Emily